Scribner's Magazine
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SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE July, 1912 Volume 52, Issue 1 Important notice The MJP’s digital edition of the July 1912 issue of Scribner’s Magazine (52:1) is incomplete. It lacks the front and back covers of the magazine, the magazine’s table of contents, and all of the advertising that, in a typical issue of the magazine, could run for a hundred pages and appeared both before and after the magazine contents reproduced below. Because we were unable to locate an intact copy of this magazine, we made our scan from a six-month volume of Scribner’s (kindly provided to us by the John Hay Library, at Brown), from which all advertising was stripped when it was initially bound many years ago. For a better sense of what this magazine originally looked like, please refer to any issue in our collection of Scribner’s except for the following five incomplete issues: December 1910, January 1911, August 1911, July 1912, and August 1912. If you happen to know where we may find an intact, cover-to-cover hard copy of any of these five issues, we would appreciate if you would contact the MJP project manager at: [email protected] Drawn by Jules Guerin. STATION SQUARE, FOREST HILLS GARDENS, LONG ISLAND. —" Modcl Towns in America," page 20- SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE VOL. LII JULY, 1912 NO. 1 THE GARDEN CITIES OF ENGLAND By Frederic C. Howe BELATED transit facilities cities of Great Britain, have vainly strug• made the city what it is. gled with the housing problem. They have The 'bus, horse-car, electric built municipal dwellings, have tried to con• trolley, and suburban train trol private tenements, but the inrush of failed to keep pace with ur• people swamped their most ambitious ef• ban growth. Men had to forts. live near their work. The city grew in The garden city made its appearance the only direction open to it, toward the about eight years ago. It marks the begin• heavens. It assumed a perpendicular in• ning of a change in the industrial, social, stead of a horizontal form. Inadequate and domestic relations of society. It means transit intensified high land values. Bad that cities are to be rebuilt, that civiliza• means of transit and high land values made tion is to change its forms, that the city of the slum. The city would have been a very the future will be a far different thing from different thing had transportation permitted what it is to-day. It will occupy a very wide it. It would have spread over a wide area. area. It will be beautiful, healthy, com• Transit has begun to catch up with the fortable. It will urbanize the country. This city. It has opened up the country. In in turn will ruralize the city. consequence the city is again being trans• The garden city, too, is a shifting of em• formed: in this country by the suburban phasis from property to people, from the communities which encircle it; in Belgium individual to the community. The motive by the sale of cheap workingmen's tickets which inspires it is the maximum of com• on state-owned railroad lines which enable fort, convenience, and happiness at the the workingman to travel twenty-four miles minimum of financial and personal cost. for two cents and live on the farms and in It marks a widening of community rights the far outlying villages. and an enlargement of community ser• In England improved transit has given vices. It means the building of the city by birth to the garden suburb. It has made the city itself, from the foundations up• possible the garden city. This is England's ward and from centre to circumference. latest, possibly her greatest, contribution to The garden-city idea has developed with the city problem, to the housing of the great rapidity. It has not yet solved the workingman, the clerk, and the moderately city problem, nor has it stamped out the well-to-do classes of the great cities. The slum. It has shown how this can be done discovery came none too soon. For the however. And that is the first step to the city is sapping the vitality of Great Britain. solution of the problem. Birmingham is In that country four people out of five live planning a suburb of three thousand seven under urban conditions. And statesmen hundred acres. Manchester has offered and reformers have stood aghast at the de• prizes for the best plans for developing a cay in the physical and moral fibre of the large outlying area and the building of cot• nation, due to the disease-breeding condi• tages to rent from seven and one-half to tion of the tenements and slums. London, ten dollars a month. Forty architects and Liverpool, Glasgow, Sheffield, all the large landscape gardeners submitted plans to this Vol.. LII.—i The Garden Cities of England competition. Suburban-building and gar• creasing land values which the building of den-village projects are being carried out at the community creates. The garden city Romford, a suburb of London, at York, is in effect its own ground landlord. In• Liverpool, Bristol, Hull, Rochdale. Ilford, directly it is a house-builder and house- Harborne, Ealing, Earlsworth, and else• owner. It operates through a private cor• where. These projects are being pro• poration which owns the land, pledged by moted by cities, co-operative companies, its charter to limit its dividends to five per and private individuals. They have been cent on the capital actually invested, and made possible by the success of the garden to use the speculative increase of land val• city and the enactment of a national town- ues for the community. planning law in 1909, which empowers These are the physical foundations of the local authorities to develop the territory garden city. To these are added, where surrounding a city as a comprehensive necessary, the adjustment of transit to whole. The helplessness of the English near-by cities so that rapid communication cities, baffled for years by the tenement will be possible, as well as the ownership or problem, by high disease and mortality a close working arrangement with the water, rates and increasing poor taxes, has been gas, and electricity supply. These form the changed to hope and enthusiasm. In a plumbing of the city. They are essential few years' time a score of public and semi- to the life, comfort, and convenience of the public garden developments have sprung people and the promotion of industry. up in various parts of the country. Most The main difference between the ordi• of these undertakings are tributary to a nary city and the garden city is this: the city. But all of them mark an abandon• former is left to the unrestrained license of ment of the barrack-like tenements and speculators, builders, owners, to a constant monotonous cottages of a few years ago conflict of public and private interests; the and the substitution of beautifully planned latter treats the community as a unit, with suburbs, designed by landscape artists, out rights superior to those of any of its indi• in the country where land is cheap and gen• vidual members. One is a city of unre• erous provision for health, recreation, and lated, and for the most part uncontrolled, beauty is possible. For the housing of a private property rights; the other is a com• people is a land as well as a transportation munity intelligently planned and harmoni• problem. A recognition of these economic ously adjusted, with the emphasis always on foundations underlies all of the new hous• the rights to the community rather than on ing projects. the rights of the individual property owner. The garden communities of Letchworth, There are three types of garden cities: Hampstead, Bournville, and Port Sunlight one, the self-contained industrial communi• have demonstrated that clean, wholesome, ty like Letch worth; two, the garden suburb, comfortable cottages are possible for every• like Hampstead; and three, the factory vil• body and at the very low rent of from five lage built about a manufacturing plant by dollars a month upward. They have de• some large employer. Port Sunlight and monstrated too that life is lengthened, the Bournville are the best examples of the lat• death and infant mortality rate is reduced, ter. All have the same underlying features and labor is more efficient in these open-air of control by some superior community au• communities than in the cities, and that thority. working people gladly follow their employ• The idea originated with Mr. Ebenezer ers to these more attractive surroundings. Howard, who published a book on garden In the building of garden villages three cities in 1898 entitled " To-Morrow." things are recognized as fundamental: one, From this dream the garden city took form, the purchase of a large area of low-priced and finally, in 1903, Letchworth was incor• agricultural land in advance of any devel• porated. It differs from the other garden opment; two, the permanent control of the cities in being an independent city with a whole area, as well as of streets, open spaces, complete municipal life of its own. It is and building regulations by the corporation an industrial city like Gary, Ind., with all or the city; and three, the reservation by the the functions and activities of a self-con• community, through the private corpora• tained community. And just as Gary was tion promoting the enterprise, of the in• built by the United States Steel Corporation The Garden Cities of England as a convenient place for the making of iron vailing winds so that the dust and smoke and steel products, just as it was planned in will be carried away from the city, while gas detail with reference to water and rail trans• and electricity are furnished at such a low portation, with provision for the needs of cost as almost to dispense with coal as a mills and furnaces, so Letchworth was fuel.